Record 1 Billion iOS, Android Apps Downloaded Last Week

January 3, 2012

People didn’t waste any time getting acquainted with their new iOS and Android devices that they received Christmas last month: following the largest amount of device activations for a single day on Christmas Day, people spent the following week filling up their new devices with tons of apps.

Flurry reports that people didn’t just tip-toe into the mobile app waters, either – they dove right in with a 60% increase of app downloads for iOS and Android devices during the final week of December 25 – 31 and, for the first time, posted a watermark above 1 billion downloads for a single week.

As much as the Christmas spirit can be said to be the instigator for all of this app downloading due to the gifting of new iOS and Android devices, it can’t be singled out as the sole responsible agent. App downloads in China, Sourth Korea and Japan – countries wherein Christmas is not so widely observed – contributed over 100 million apps downloaded in the final week of 2011. Flurry points out that “South Korea and Japan have the 4th and 5th largest smart device installed bases of all countries, yet they ranked 7th and 10th, respectively, for downloads over the record week.” The full data stats of app downloads for the last week of 2011 are below.

So given that this is probably more of a market swell than a holiday trend, Flurry says that we shouldn’t be surprised if this rate of downloaded apps doesn’t repeat a few times in 2012:

Looking forward to 2012, Flurry expects breaking the one-billion-download-barrier per week will become more common-place. While iOS and Android growth continues to amaze, the market is still by all measures relatively nascent. We look forward to continuing to chart the unprecedented adoption of mobile computing devices, usage of applications and the way in which this technology is changing consumer behavior worldwide.

One thing that Flurry didn’t point out is that these statistics may just be correlations without actually demonstrating causality. Sure, more active devices anticipates more app downloads but even then that doesn’t explicitly explain the bulge of apps downloaded between Christmas morning and New Year’s Day. Given that the lull between the two holidays is typically filled with abundant free time and possibly awkward family gatherings, people likely downloaded a lot more apps this week for the same reason they always have: they were bored. But all those new phones probably helped out exponentially, as well.

Did you get a new phone? Did you download apps last week and thus contribute to the record-breaking swell of downloads in a single week? What’d ya download? Let us know below.